The number of studies on meditation and its mechanistic basis has significantly increased since the 1990s.

“When those studies were done, what was discovered was really quite miraculous, really. And now we don't think of it as surprising, but what was discovered was a huge laundry list of brain changes. And then when people were evaluated in their outside life, so when they would fill out reports of their subjective feelings of happiness or they would report their sleep, or even if objective measures were taken like changes in hormones or markers of inflammation, et cetera, a large list of information fell out of that which revealed that indeed there are many, a dozen or more clear benefits of a regular meditation practice, and some of those meditation practices could be quite short.”